Sunday, May 31, 2009

It has seemed for weeks now as if the Cheney's - dad Dick and daughter Liz - are on a never ending, "Please don't put my Daddy in Jail" tour, in which they insist that there are secret documents which, if released, would prove that "torture works" and exonerate the old war criminal from his crimes; although I must admit that I never thought the fact that any crime "worked" has ever previously stopped any criminal activity from being a crime.

But now Carl Levin, someone who was privy to the same materials Cheney has been talking about, has stepped up to the plate to say that these documents don't actually say what Cheney and his daughter are claiming that they say.

"Mr. Cheney has also claimed that the release of classified documents would prove his view that the techniques worked. But those classified documents say nothing about numbers of lives saved, nor do the documents connect acquisition of valuable intelligence to the use of the abusive techniques. I hope that the documents are declassified so that people can judge for themselves what is fact and what is fiction."

Why should we be remotely surprised? The Bush administration lied about WMD, they lied about Saddam's links to al Qaeda, they lied about exposing Valerie Plame, they lied about torture, and now Levin says they are lying about the results which they claim they gained from that torture.

At what point do we stop being surprised that an administration which lied more than almost any other - apart from Nixon's - is caught, once again, lying?

UPDATE:

Rachel Maddow on the same subject, with clips of just how often the Cheney's have made these bogus claims. She then discusses with Steve Benen of The Washington Monthly the significance of Levin's intervention.

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Tortured.

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That is why the greatest danger of all is to allow new walls to divide us from one another.

The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes; natives and immigrants; Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.